Caterpillar Inc. of Peoria, Ill., manufactures off-road mining mobile machines. For example, the Caterpillar 777C is an off-road mining truck. In commonly owned U.S. Pat. No. 5,390,125, Kyrtsos et al disclose an autonomous mobile machine system for use with a mining mobile machine such as the 777C truck. Such a n autonomous mobile machine system may be used, for example, to implement an autonomous mining operation. For example, a plurality of autonomous dump trucks can haul rock from an excavation site to a crusher site in an open pit mining operation.
Commonly owned U.S. patent appl. No 08/536,761, filed Sep. 29, 1995, "Method and Apparatus for Determining a Path for a Machine Between a Predetermined Route and a Final Position" discloses an apparatus and method for automatically determining and modeling a path between a route and a final position. Such a mobile machine method and system may be used to implement a mobile machine mining operation. For example, a plurality of autonomous dump trucks can haul rock from an excavation site to a crusher site in an open pit mining operation using this system to plan a path to a final position.
In addition, in commonly owned U.S. Pat. No. 5,586,030, Kemner et al disclose a system using a queuing technique to manage a single input, fixed position resource. However, in a mining system, there are resources such as shovel loaders, which are not fixed position resources. For example, in a load resource having a shovel loader, the position of the loader and the location of the load point may change. When the load point changes, mobile machines must be informed of the new load point. In addition, when the position of the shovel loader changes, the route required to reach the new load point may change.
The present invention is directed to overcoming one or more of the problems as set forth above.